 This
world is fucked. Maybe it's the endless brutal winter getting to
me. Maybe it's my resultant lack of exercise. Maybe it's the total
absurdity of the belief that Obama or anyone else can possibly hope to
prevent the ghastly slide into truly horrific civilizational collapse
that's now well underway. Or just maybe the wave of changes I've been
going through for the past year is reaching a tipping point, and I'm on
the cusp of a truly radical change, a complete starting-all-over.
Whatever it is, I'm in a cranky mood. I've read all my favourite blogs,
chatted this week to many of the people I love and think I might come
to love, and they have provided me with neither inspiration nor
consolation. That is not, of course, their fault, nor their
responsibility. But the result is that I'm feeling disinclined to
write, to talk, or to do any of the things that I had previously been
working on with considerable enthusiasm.
More on this tomorrow, I think. In the meantime, if this week's links
seem a little bland and superficial, it's because my head and heart are
somewhere else. I'm not quite sure where.
The
Solution to Peak Oil and Climate Change: Dream On:
Richard Heinberg lays out the five
steps needed to prevent, or at least mitigate, the coming peak oil and
climate change crises. Nice
plan, even though it would require a collective will and coordination
that our political/economic systems are incapable of. Thanks to Lucas Gonzales
for the link.
1. Make a massive and
immediate shift to renewable energy
2. Electrify the transportation system (and stop investing in
oil-powered transportation infrastructure)
3. Rebuild the electricity grid (relocalize, move to "smart"
grid)
4. De-carbonize and relocalize the food system
5. Retrofit all buildings for energy efficiency and energy
production
The
Solution to the Broken US Health Care System:
Beth Patterson points us to ex-Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber's We
Can Do Better movement, which
has come up with 12 principles for a viable US health care system based
on a year of community based discussions -- the wisdom of crowds:
1. We cannot solve the health care crisis by simply giving everyone
insurance coverage (i.e. this is not just an insurance problem).
2. We are all in this together and have challenged the whole concept of
“categorical eligibility.”
3. All Americans should be eligible for and have timely access to
effective treatment for at least the same set of essential health
conditions (“core benefit”)
4. The core benefit should be portable and not tied to employment.
5. In terms of financing, we believe the first emphasis should be on
the public resources already being spent on health care. We are not
trying to dictate what people do with their private after-tax dollars,
but rather to ensure that public resources are spent in a way that is
equitable, efficient and effective in producing health.
6. Market competition should be based on cost, quality and outcomes,
not the avoidance of risk.
7. We must explicitly recognize the reality of fiscal limits and that
we cannot purchase everything for everyone.
8. We must acknowledge the inevitability of at least a two-tiered
system; that people with more disposable income will always be able to
purchase more than people with fewer resources. People should be able
to purchase additional services that may not be covered in the core
benefit. The challenge is to ensure that the core benefit (the
“floor”) is adequate to provide for the health of
all Americans.
9. All medical interventions are not of equal value and effectiveness
in producing health, and therefore a prioritization process must be
established to decide what will be financed with the public resources.
10. Individuals should be more directly involved in their own health
care treatment decisions.
11. It is important to promote healthy behaviors through strategies
that focus on both individual choices (responsibility) and
environmental influences.
12. Co-payments should be used not simply to shift costs to
individuals, but rather to influence individual behavior by placing
lower co-payments (or no co-payments) for highly effective procedures
backed by good scientific evidence and higher co-payments on lower
priority interventions.
Six
Rules for Book Reviewers:
From the late John
Updike (thanks to Tree
for the link and the one that follows):
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him
for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of
the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression,
can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book,
if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How
astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers
blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on
a peasants' revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful
narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the
author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the
detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool
who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the
same lines, from the author's ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand
the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
6. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or
committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of
any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an
idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never
(John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author "in his place,"
making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book,
not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being
cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion
between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of
certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should
curve toward that end."
Eating
Dirt is Good For You: Scientists
say exposure
to a wide range of germs as a baby helps build a healthy immune system.
Duh. And still the sales of disinfectants, antibiotics and
antibacterials soar, parents shrug off their pets to the pound
when the baby's born, and autoimmune disease rates skyrocket.
The
Future of Food: A 2020
scenario from a local food system
researcher predicts starvation and riots. I think it's further off, but
accurate. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.
California
Emission Rules Would Bankrupt Detroit:
So
say the US auto makers, who want
more time to fiddle. And they were doing so well before these new rules
were announced.
Global
Worries Over US Debt Levels:
The annual
Davos Circus is back in session,
with the usual doltish clowns presenting the usual discredited nonsense
to the usual clueless crowd of rich and powerful barons digging in to
defend their obscene entitlements.
Will
an Endless Recession Usher In the Long Emergency?:
The tunnel-visioned economists are still talking about how to stimulate
citizens to spend more and get deeper in debt, and the timing of the
'recovery'. But what happens if, this time, there is no recovery, no
insane belief in perpetual growth and spending your way out of the
crises caused by reckless spending? The Automatic Earth says we should watch
Iceland, the Baltics, the Balkans, and Ireland as states that could
fall first, as personal and
corporate bankruptcies lead to national bankruptcies and, perhaps, a
'recession' without end. Thanks to Eric
Lilius for the link, and the
link to the silly money videos below. And in a similar vein Douglas
Coupland asks:
What
if we actually do spend 10 percent less this year — and then decide to stay
at that level? Is that
healthy? Will China implode? What will be the next Iceland?... Right
now, it seems almost impossible to imagine ever spending more on things
except, maybe, gasoline. And yet the
prospect of less consumption fills us with dread.
It's not the having less part that is frightening — people
are generally happy as long as everybody's in the same boat. What's
frightening is the fear that our system can't handle less, and it's not
as if there's some other system out there shouting: "Try me! Try me!"
Cloud
Computing and the End of the Desktop PC?:
Some are speculating that ubiquitous
high-speed bandwidth means the end of the need for a hard drive,
and hence the end of the desktop computer. I
told you so.
All
the Key US Economic Data in One Document:
From this
New York Fed site you can
download, each
month, in chart form, all the key economic data for the US in one
32-page PDF file. Bookmark it.
Just
for Fun: Some treasures on
YouTube:
- Acoustic Alchemy - Wind
of Change - music to meditate by
- The Late Victor Borge
- Improvisation
- then 80 years of age, Borge had heard but never played this music,
and made up this accompaniment on the spot
- 16-year-old Mary
Copeley - Bach's
Little Fugue - recorded by her
little brother, as
she was just playing around from memory
- Bernstein - Ravel
Concerto in G - second movement,
played and conducted by the maestro
- And finally, the
British send up the financial industry, as only they can, in Silly
Money. Part 4 is the funniest,
but they're all good.
And
if you're not into video, why not join me as part of Ivor Tymchak's Cult
of Culture. My role in the cult:
Big Ass Flonking Integration Luminary (BAFIL), offering other cult
members transformation to stellar perfection (TSP), one TSP at a time,
through my guided ascension breakthrough (BAFIL-GAB) sessions. It is
likely however, that those humble enough to actually enroll for
BAFIL-GAB will probably be inherently inadequate to be allowed
ascension. But I might be persuaded.
Or you can play The Bailout Game,
and see if you can beat Bernanke at his own game. Thanks to Theresa
Purcell for the link.
Thoughts
for the Week:
HOUSE FINCH by
David
Bonta
One finch doesn’t
fly with the others,
his eyes clouded
over. Whatever
panics the others
never shakes him,
gripping the perch
he had struggled
to find, flying by
sound, by shadows,
by the sudden wind
from fifty wings
leaving him alone
at the round
house of a feeder,
pulling gray sun-
flower seeds
from under
its doors.
IF
I COULD DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN
by EO Wilson
If I could do it all over again and relive my vision in the
twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist…Into
that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular
analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across
grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water
proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in
order to discover new life ways and alien food webs. All this, and I
need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building.
The jaguars, ants, and orchids would still occupy distant forests in
all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger
and vastly more complex living world virtually without end.
Image: New Yorker cover
by Charles
E Martin from September 11, 1971 |
My book is available to US buyers
from the 
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY
